TeuxDeux

The designer and blogger Tina Roth Eisenberg has come up with a neat little to-do service with a cute name: TeuxDeux. She has pared this free offering back to the absolute essentials of to-do-ness: seven days viewed at once, a list below, order or day of task changed by drag and drop, click twice to finalise a task, click little cross to delete. Future tasks are black, past are grey and present tasks are red. And that's it. It works. One might wish for additional features and email > task capabilities, but any additional features would tend to muddy what is a very clean interface.

Source Sans for the Masses

Adobe Systems are best known as the company behind Photoshop, Adobe Acrobat and InDesign. They also have been involved in the design and sale of typefaces for many years. In an unusually generous move, Adobe have released Source Sans —a very accomplished sans serif type family, for the price of absolutely nothing. Available in 6 weights, Source Sans is elegant, practical and suitable for portable devices, the web and print. A real workhorse typeface that designers will return to again and again, but useful for nondesigners who want to go beyond the usual defaults of Arial and Times.

Joe Queenan defends the printed book

American writer and humorist Joe Queenan explains why he thinks paper books "are sublimely visceral, emotionally evocative objects that constitute a perfect delivery system". Indeed, the idea of reading a single, relatively coherent piece of work that is not hyperlinked and studded with distractions and animations, and which the reader actually owns rather than rents, is rather attractive. No compatibility issues, can be read by anyone, can be loaned, sold or given away, and takes up space in an actual physical location, and will wait patiently to be read, or re-read. The growth of ebook publishing has slowed somewhat in recent months, so those of us with a lingering passion for paper can still hope 'real' books will survive as a viable business model and an inspiration to people for whom speed and 'convenience' are not everything.

A Taxonomy of Rapper Names

If you like your information visual, Pop Chart Lab merits closer examination. Their graphic designer takes light-hearted topics (rapper names, Hollywood haircuts, baseball, beer varieties and more) and turns them into gorgeous schematic diagrams.

"Pop Chart Lab was founded in August 2010 by a book editor and a graphic designer who joined forces with one modest goal in mind: to render all of human experience in chart form."  

Each poster has been meticulously researched and stands as an aesthetic tour de force as well as a conduit for some rather bizarre information.

Flatland on the Internet

Down with faux fur, ersatz stone, chiselled letters and imitation wood! Designers rise up against illusion and visual misdirection! A designer makes a good case against the current vogue for making interfaces look like physical objects. Pare it back, leaving only the absolutely essential .

"Remove the unnecessary embellishments and keep stripping until you’ve almost gone too far. We believe that elegant interfaces are ones that have the most impact with the fewest elements."

Manipulating PDFs online

The full version of Adobe Acrobat is fairly expensive. Most desktop PC users have the free Acrobat Reader installed, but Reader offers few tools to manipulate PDF files. Sejda (currently in beta) is working to bring a fairly full feature set of browser based tools for PDF editing. Features currently offered include encryption, merging, splitting, rotating and combining. Future tools will include cropping, page transitions, text extraction and more. Potentially a very useful and public-spirited tool.

Book Launches Can Be Effective

Rosie Abbot, author of Scent of Belonging reports that the recent launch of her book went extremely well.

'The Scent of Belonging' launch at Collins in Bairnsdale last night was a huge success. An audience of about 50 on a cold week night in the country is a great attendance. I spoke for about 30 minutes, followed by terrific book sales and signings that pleased Di Johnston, Manager of Collins Booksellers. Feedback has been rolling in. An extract from the latest email:

"Your sermon to the multitudes last night was inspiring. For someone “out of their comfort zone” you did a helluva job! You were interesting, warm, and your straightforward style and honesty did you proud. I think the sustained applause at the end of your talk was the proof of the pud. Congratulations!"

An earlier launch, held in my home town of Paynesville in July, attracted similar numbers and I am now receiving very positive feedback from readers. 

The book is currently being reviewed by CAE Melbourne Book Groups for consideration in their catalogue; I have some book club 'meet the author, discuss the book' events lined up in November, and am currently arranging another launch at Collins Booksellers in Traralgon, Central Gippsland.

Collins Booksellers in Bairnsdale have devoted a full window display to the promotion of 'The Scent of Belonging' which will be pride of place for two weeks (photos attached). Let's hope sales skyrocket!

 If an author knows their market, has good local support and gets the word out, a launch can be a real financial and emotional boost.

Be Your Own Newspaper Mogul

There's an American pundit who likes to bang on about the 'hyper-personal news stream' that will supposedly come to dominate the way we consume news. We will select a highly individualised stream of information that closely mirrors our preferences. A taste of this future can be seen with the various news aggregators. Paper.li can take Twitter, Facebook or Google+ feeds and turn them into quite an attractive simulation of a newspaper. A business can build a collection of feeds likely to be of interest to its clients, including their own tweets or Facebook posts. A pro version of the service also allows a company to add their brand/logo to the newsletter, currently $9 per month.

Printing in the People's Republic

Many, if not most, Australian publishers and plenty of individual authors have books printed in China. The printing prices on offer are very attractive, and the quality often excellent. However there is a dark side to printing in the People's Republic: censorship. You might think that a book being printed for an Australian (or any other non-Chinese audience) would be simply printed and shipped back to the client. This is only partially correct: it is checked by Chinese censors to make sure the book in question conforms to certain Chinese sensitivities — even if not a single Chinese citizen is destined to read it. Such sensitivities include drugs, sexuality and references to China and Chinese history. If your book mentions Taiwan, for example, you had better make sure it reads as "Taiwan (China)". If your book discusses Chairman Mao in anything but the most glowing terms, better find another country to print it. The Chinese government interest in content is a salutary reminder that the country is burdened with a dictatorship, with all the stifling, anti-democratic and bureaucratic impulses that go with that kind of government.

Comic Sans Speaks...

Long maligned by type snobs, Comic Sans comes out swinging in a candid op-ed. As the combative typeface says, "Sorry the entire world can’t all be done in stark Eurotrash Swiss type. Sorry some people like to have fun. Sorry I’m standing in the way of your minimalist Bauhaus-esque fascist snoozefest."

What the Web is Made Of

Even casual users of the Internet will have noticed its constant evolution. Sites are vastly more sophisticated, attractive and responsive than they once were. Usability has evolved into a fine art and ecommerce has finally come of age. If you are interested in the underlying machinery that makes the modern Web hum, this website will be of interest. Displayed as a timeline, the site charts the arrival and growth of various protocols, security initiatives, programming languages and browsers. The early days of the Web are revealed in all their primitive glory and the sophistication of the current moment (with much more to come).

 

 

Waders of Australia

Soon to be printed/published, Waders: the Shorebirds of Australia has been an epic labour of love for its author David Hollands. He has travelled to almost every corner of Australia to photograph and document every single species of endemic and visiting wader. The result is both informative and evocative, with strong arguments for habitat conservation. We have tried for a transparent design and layout -- letting the content and images speak for themselves.

Viewing Photoshop Files without Photoshop

Viewing native files from programs such as Photoshop or Illustrator can be difficult if you don't own the often very expensive packages. Google has recently added a useful functionality to Google Drive — the ability to accurately preview a number of exotic formats, including psd, ai, ttf and dxf. You won't be able to edit said files, but at least you will know what they contain. Users do not need to join Google apps (though doing so is a good idea) but can just go here to view immediately in-browser.

Principles for User-Friendly Web Services

A creditable attempt by the UK government to enshrine a list of simple principles for constructing user-friendly web-based services. The ten items listed are:

1. Start with needs
2. Do less
3. Design with data
4. Do the hard work to make it simple
5. Iterate. Then iterate again.
6. Build for inclusion
7. Understand context
8. Build digital services, not websites
9. Be consistent, not uniform
10. Make things open: it makes things better

 

The website then goes on to enlarge on each point, giving concrete examples. The site authors promise to continually refine the list of principles. 

Atlas of Living Australia

The Atlas of Living Australia is a user-friendly visualisation of data related to Australian ecosystems, species and conservation programs. Simple to use and well thought-out, the website exemplifies the massive power of the web in displaying a range of information and making it accessible and understandable. Users can check biodiversity in their own area, browse for species of interest or add their own records. So if you've just spotted the elusive Night Parrot, this is the place to let the world know.

Wire Worm for Photoshop

While it sounds like a nasty intestinal parasite, Wire Worm is a plugin designed to rid your photographs of pesky unwanted artefacts (particularly wires). Like many modern Photoshop plugins and features, it does a lot of the heavy lifting automatically, calculating the replacement colour /tones and shapes from the surrounding background. And it does a pretty good job, cutting down on the need for fiddling around with endless cloning and other patching techniques.

E Book Promotional Hints for Authors

From book distributor Dennis Jones, the following practical suggestions for getting traction with your ebook offerings.

1. Sites where you can add yourself as an author, and your book if it's not already listed (or add to the details about your book if it's already there)

2. Some useful starting points about blogging and social networking

3. Mobilise your fans/family/friends on these sites

On any site that allows ratings/reviews (such as those above), ask all your friends and relatives (and anyone you know with an internet account) to go and rave about your books with positive comments and ratings… many sites are also now starting to feature Facebook 'Like' buttons or Google+ '+1' buttons, so any friends who are on those social networks should make sure they click these as well. Every good review, 5-star rating or 'Like' will add to the book's visibility in searches both on the bookseller sites and in general internet searches. Amazon leads the way here (as they do for general online shopping customer interaction); Kobo has some interesting features available for accountholders (it's free to join), including automated linking to Facebook inside the 'Reading Life' area of their site; Booku allows reviews, ratings, likes and +1s

4)  Other ideas

Make sure you include links on your blog/website to other blogs/web resources you have found useful, they will often give you a 'link-back' which will add traffic to your site(s).

Don't limit yourself by only thinking about how to use your online presence to attract new readers, make sure you interact with other authors doing the same thing, learn from them, compare notes, share tips. Whenever you visit another author's blog/site look at all of the links they have included, there will almost always be something of interest there.